"Mẹ ơi!"* I said,
holding up a silver pot for my mother to look at. I was
four years old, and I had just discovered this treasure
in a nearby dumpster. It was during one of those summers when I spent most
of the days under the blue and white Bavarian
skies, summers that smelled of effluent and chlorine and that tasted
like fries and salt. The air glistened and
my knees were constantly bloody from playing in the gravel. When we children
wanted a fright, we'd plow our way through the lush undergrowth to a witch's
house. There was no witch living there, of course,
but a poor old woman. Entropy had gotten the better of her house and she looked
mean.

My
friends and I lived in an asylum hostel, a former inn belonging to the local
brewery. I was born in the early 1990s and, like most of the children, had
never known any other home. There was Fitore and Besa, Valdrina and Vildane,
and all their brothers and sisters. We didn't share a language, but we got
along just fine all the same. Often, we would wander through the neighborhood in
search of treasure. We would find sweet plums or
perhaps some ladybugs – and on really good days, we might find something useful
for our parents. Like the pot.

When dark shadows began to embrace the
house, we would
return to our rooms, exhausted. Each family had but one. Our wallpaper was
yellowing; on the right was a table, a chest of drawers and an altar to our
ancestors, on the left a narrow bed. A little kumquat
tree was added for the New Year's festival. There wasn't room for much else. A
box of food was provided twice a week: Asians received a bit of rice, a frozen
chicken and lots of onions.

One
day, my father brought home a sofa bed he had found on the side of the road.
He
slept on it from that day forward. We were happy. In my father's asylum hearing,
he had said: "I want to live with my wife in Germany because there is
peace. We hope to find work in Germany."

When
darkness fell, the cockroaches would crawl out from behind the cabinets in search
of crumbs. But they didn't have an easy time of it. Many died in
our traps made of toothpicks and adhesive tape. I would look for their lifeless
bodies in the mornings. "Otherwise, they'll crawl into your mouth when
you're sleeping," my mother would say as she tossed the adhesive tape into
the garbage.

There
were only three showers and four toilets for the 100 shelter residents, so the
men would simply pee on the walls in the hallway. Their sons would do the same.
One boy giggled as he drew wet yellow lines on a pillar. The toilets were
awful. One woman even took her life there, managing to force her way through a
narrow window and plunging to the pavement below. She was from Mongolia, the
adults said. They knew little else about her.

On
rainy days, we children would visit each other. Fitore's family had the biggest
room and even a television, where her father could often be found watching news
from home and shaking his head. Kosovo was consumed by war and the bleeding
victims would reach us by way of the satellite dish at the window. "That is happening
back home," Fitore would say. "It’s bad,
isn’t it?" Then her mother would bring us sweet cookies.